A major survey into UK productivity has calculated the inefficiency of meetings across the business sector and the cost of this to companies.
According to findings unveiled by international productivity software developer MatchWare, 103 minutes are wasted on average in the planning, implementation and follow-up of every meeting, leading to almost £50bn worth of wasted time each year. MatchWare has analysed thousands of meetings in an attempt to streamline these processes.
UK employees attend an average of 4.4 meetings per week, amounting to a total of 228.8 meetings per year per worker and a ‘meeting universe’ of 7,436bn across the workforce of 32.5m. With five people attending a typical meeting, this totals 1.487bn meetings across the UK each year. Bearing MatchWare’s analysis in mind, the 103 mins – 1.72 hours – translates into 2.558bn hours wasted.
When referenced against the average national hourly wage of £18.22, the staggering figure of an equivalent cost of £46.6bn wasted demonstrates the extent of a problem that is prevalent across UK business. Without taking international markets into consideration, the concept of productivity, or lack thereof, in meetings is a troublesome one.
Ulrik Merrild, Sales Director at MatchWare, said, “These huge figures put into context the problem of inefficiency across the whole of the business sector, when it comes to the management of meetings. From planning, through to output, there is an inordinate amount of time being wasted by UK companies through a variety of archaic processes, which do not effectively build a structured meeting workflow and output.
“We know from our clients that this problem is prevalent in big businesses, which host regular meetings with large numbers of staff and this is prohibitive. But by driving meeting accountability and accessibility, whilst providing an agile software that can be adapted to meet individual client requirements, time can be dramatically reduced across the whole meeting process.”
The findings coincide with the launch of MatchWare’s fifth generation of its international enterprise meeting software, MeetingBooster.
MeetingBooster 5.0 is the new industry standard for meeting management, making business meetings more efficient and accountable. It facilitates a standardised meeting process, with the ability to assign pre-meeting tasks, allocate actions during meetings, and deliver professional minutes in customisable layouts, all within a single web-based solution.
Helping clients build a structured meeting workflow and output, MeetingBooster 5.0’s technology provides an end-to-end management solution to combat the inefficiencies of agendas, minute-taking and the delegation of post-meeting actions. Its transformation of the whole meeting ecosystem has revolutionised the way that its clients do business. 83 percent of current MeetingBooster users say that meeting attendees were more engaged and better prepared following the introduction of the software.
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